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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Multiplayer Zombie Garden Adventure

**Please contact me if you get a message about the server being down!!!**

This is a game designed for multiple players on 2 teams - It should run in any web browser that supports the HTML5 canvas element.... HOWEVER *USE CHROME* for best results as the networking will be smoother than any other browser.

I don't quite know where to begin describing the process of developing this game. Suffice to say I did something more complicated (by the networking) than I should have. The shooring mechanics are buggy and the graphics are barely more than placeholders but it was a rush at end to get some actual game mechanics in.

On the birght side, as an excercise in writing a multiplayer tcp server and client this was more successfull than I expected. Especially when leveraging web sockets in chrome. The speed is awesome considering it's HTML and people are used to this tech having a latency of a couple of seconds, nevermind 16ms!!.

If you're looking for the theme, it's the idea that you should take some team-mates into the middle of the maze with you, since you can't fight off the zombies on your own when carrying a jewel.

Multiplayer was a nice tough, although there wasn't anyone else playing when I tried it out. The shooting was hard to see, and it seemed like the zombies were pretty hard to kill (I guess that was the point of backup though). Didn't work in firefox 3, ok in chrome.

Could be fun with enough players. The map seemed too large, but not-unexpectedly, I was alone. I found that as I moved within the maze, I slowly left the center of the screen, which made me feel claustrophobic (not in a good way) if I was going in the direction where the sightlines were limited. Could use weapon/bullet animation.

Thanks everyone who tried this out so far! I haven't been replying and haven't made a post mortem post either only because I've had some more serious things to deal with IRL since almost the instant that I finished the compo.

A few things I will quickly reply to now:

The original intent was for game to be a bit like multiplayer Gauntlet, I simply ran out of time to have Gauntlet style projectile weapons.

Shooting was the very last thing I coded. There are 3 issues with the zombie shooting mechanic. Firstly the zombies bunch up to the extent that what looks like 1 zombie is often a stack of zombies. Secondly, the real position of the zombie on the server is not the position to use to determine if it's been shot (the client is trusted because it was quicker to code it that way) and thirdly the check to see if a zombie has been shot depends on what tile both the player and zombie are in. Which is a problem since this is determined by the sprite hotspots and not by bounding rectangles.

I spent about 40% of the time writing the networking code and about 40% writing the essential drawing, animation, pathfinding and collision code. less than 20% was spent on proper game coding and graphics... Loking forward to the next Ludum by which time I will have proper base code, as this is the tech I think I want to use.

Finally, I think the firefox issue is related to firebug. I developed the game in firefox and there is an awful lot of stuff output to the firebug console. I'm not sure what happens when firebug isn't installed/enabled but chrome clearly ignores it.

Sorry about the server, it died due to lack of socket exception handling in the code that sends chat messages to all players, for whatever reason it tried to send a message to a player who wasn't connected anymore and crashed :(